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JOANA MATOS FRIAS/PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA–TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
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TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
JOANA MATOS FRIAS
Universidade do Porto
PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA
Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Allen Ginsberg, along with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, led a
generation of American writers, artists and professional rebels called the “Beat
Generation”, which came to light during the 1950’s, a period known for its puritan outlook
and moralizing attitudes, as well as for the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.
McCarthyism, however horrible and incomprehensible its persecutions and witch-hunts
were, gave rise to political and social struggles which would change both the course of
American history and the face of American letters. Ginsberg, while still a student at
Columbia University, in New York City, realized American society was built up on
hypocrisy, and, in fact, by the time he graduated, the “tupperware” culture, as Norman
Mailer would say, was taking over, with the post-war economy and optimism at its highest,
moral righteousness at its worst, and political transparency at its lowest. The world of
which he is witness and his long poem “Howl” (Ginsberg 1988: 126) testimony seemed
clearly to need either a transmutation or a transgression of values, and Ginsberg’s poetry, as
his life, set out to accomplish both. It is in this context that Ginsberg’s literary works must
foremost be understood, and it is against this background that the task of translating his
poetry must be undertaken.
Consequently, just as with the romantic movement and modernisms of the
beginning of this century, here the aesthetics of poetry is inseparable from an ethic, erotic
and political bearing. From this standpoint, we can do nothing but agree with Henri
Meschonnic’s assertion that we translate not from a language but from a language-culture,
and even more so when he claims that “what is untranslatable is social and historic, not
metaphysical” (Meschonnic 1973: 309). The implications of this statement come down to a
most significant issue, which is not, as one would suppose, subjectivity, but the very heart
of where subjectivities meet, or intersubjectivity, a concept developed by Edmund Husserl
which resolves the dichotomy “objective” / “subjective” by securing the appearance of one
singular spatiotemporal reality for each and every separate ego-subject. Because he
experiences Others as human beings, as similar to himself, the subject also perceives them
as co-subjects, and can only infer that the world which surrounds him also surrounds them.
Therefore, despite the fact that “fields of memory and perception” will vary according to the
structure of consciousness, intersubjectivity offers us “an objective spatiotemporal fact-world
as the world about us that is there for us all, and to which we ourselves none the less belong” (Husserl
1958: 105). So the question is not whether the translator exposes his own personality, or
whether or not he should obliterate any manifestations of his personality from his
translation; instead, these idiosyncrasies should be encouraged, as an integral part of the
translative process and intersubjective relation author/translator – translation/reader. Both
the author’s and the translator’s literary, cultural and historical background intervene in the
creative process, for though the text’s components are essential, so is the tradition where it
is embedded. As João Almeida Flor so rightly puts it, “the translator’s reading is genetic as
well as structural, diachronic as well as synchronic, vertical as well as horizontal” (Flor
1983b: 16-17).